William Fox Talbot

(1800 -
1877)
" A painter's eye will often be
arrested where ordinary people see nothing remarkable."

William Fox Talbot
was born on 11 February 1800 at Melbury, Dorset, the only child of
William Davenport Talbot of Lacock Abbey and Elisabeth Theresa,
daughter of the 2nd Earl of Ilchester.

Talbot was only five months old
when his father died
and his mother was faced with the prospect of looking after an enormous
Estate in ruinous condition. His mother remarried in 1804 to Capitan
Charles Feilding (1780 - 1837). It was then that Talbot gained a real
father and, soon, two half sisters, Caroline August Feilding and
Henrietta Horatia Maria Feilding.

Talbot's extensive family
connections provided him access to high-ranking circles in science and
politics. His mother definitely had a tremendous influence on Talbot,
who inherited her love of learning and of subjects such as languages,
mathematics, politics, botany, optics and astronomy.

He was accepted at Harrow School
in 1811 and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1817, becoming a
scholar in 1819. In 1920 he won the Porson University Prize in Greek
verse. In 1921, he became twelfth Wrangler and won the second
Chancellor's Classical Medal before securing his B.A. William Fox
Talbot preceded M.A. in1825.

On 20 December 1832, he married
Constance Mundy and almost at the same time, he was elected and joined
the parliament until 1834 as the reform candidate for Chippenham.

By the time he met John (later Sir
John) Herschel in Munich in 1924, Talbot had already published six
papers in mathematics. This chance meeting established a friendship and
a scientific collaboration crucial to Talbot's later success and
probably influenced his turn towards research into light
and optical
phenomena.

In 1826, Herschel introduced him
to Dr. David Brewster, the important Scottish scientist and
encyclopaedist. Brewster and Talbot researches on light frequently
overlapped and they formed a close friendship.

In 1833, William Fox Talbot and
his wife took a much-deserved vacation to France, Switzerland, and
Italy. It was while relaxing at Lake Como in Italy that Talbot tried to
draw some pictures with the aid of a camera lucida, but found himself
in the frustrating position of not being able to sketch the scenery.
Talbot's imagination turned to the possibility of the light
itself
drawing the picture upon the paper, by using a camera obscura.

William Henry Fox
Talbot

"How
charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images
to imprint themselves durable and remain fixed upon the paper! And why
should it not be possible? I asked myself."

When he returned, William Fox
Talbot set to work experimenting and in the spring of 1834 he began to
convert his dream in to reality.

By coating ordinary writing paper
with alternate washes of table salt and silver nitrate, William Fox
Talbot embedded a light-sensitive silver chloride in the fibres of the
paper. Placed in the sun under an opaque object such as a leaf, the
paper would darken where not defended from light, producing a
photographic silhouette. Talbot called the resulting negatives
sciagraphs - drawings of shadows.

Talbot continued his research in
Geneva during the
autumn. Unable at this stage to use his paper in the camera, he asked a
friend to scratch a Landscape design into opaque varnish coated on
glass. Using this as a negative, he then made multiple copies on his
photographic paper, originating the artistic technique later known as
cliche-verre.

It was also then that William Fox
Talbot first
mentioned stabilizing his images against the further action of light by
washing them with potassium iodide - a process now called fixing.

Another method of fixing, probably
noticed by Talbot
even before Geneva, was based on his observation that the edges of his
paper some times darkened at a different rate than the centre. Tracing
this to different proportions of salt and silver, Talbot determined
that the strong solution of table salt defended.

Talbot recognized the value in
producing a negative
image at first, because it meant that the picture could be duplicated.
When the paper negative was soaked in oil it became transparent, and
could then be contact printed onto another identically sensitised
paper, a positive.

By February 28, 1835 William Fox
Talbot had described
in a letter the negative-positive system. His paper negative of Lacock
Abbey's window, made in August 1835, survives to this day. He built
many small wooden camera obscuras but he did not publicize his work. In
1835 Talbot contemplated writing a report to the Royal Academy of
Sciences, but he did not see any reason to make a premature
announcement until he had enough time to perfect the process. So, he
set aside his photographic work and directed his efforts instead on
writing a book called Hermes, or Classical and Antiquarian Research.

Daguerre and Arago's January 6,
1839 announcement in the French press of their own method of freezing
the image of the camera obscura, must have come as a shock to Talbot.

He rushed to publicise his own,
incomplete, work. He sent samples of his work to the Royal Institution
in London, which were shown to its members on January 25th 1839. These
pictures included scenes of Lacock Abbey's contact prints of lace, of
engravings, and pictures made through a microscope. He also sent
letters claiming his priority of invention to the French press science
official Francois Arago.

Daguerre's method proved to be
totally different from Talbot's, but the damage was already done. The
year 1839 was a difficult year for Talbot. The Royal Society gave him
little support, refusing to publish his work on photography in their Transactions.

Spurred on by the active
experimenting of Herschel and the enthusiastic support of Brewster,
William Fox Talbot succeeded, by the summer of 1840, in producing a
significant number of beautiful photographs.

below

The very process Talbot
had invented had taught him to see,
giving him for the first time the
ability to rapidly translate
the complex scenes of nature into
monochrome
rendering on paper.

Talbot's photogenic drawings had
been achieved by the direct action of light. When the negative was
removed from the camera, the image was fully visible, but this required
enormous solar energy and thus very long exposure.

Talbot's continuing research paid
off in a series of brilliant observations in September 1840. He
discovered that a very short exposure triggered an invisible effect in
his silver paper. By employing a chemical developer, Talbot could build
the latent image into a full-strength negative. Exposure times,
previously measured in minutes or even hours, plunged to seconds

Publicly announcing this new
negative process the following spring, Talbot called it Calotype
photogenic drawings: it was soon known as the Calotype.

Unlike Daguerre who made his
discovery available to the public at no fee, William Fox Talbot
patented his invention in England and pursued infringers. This was one
of the reasons way the Daguerreotype was more
popular. He also took out a patent in France but did not seem to have
enforced it.

In 1841, William Fox Talbot made
another important discovery - that of the latent image.
Previously, the sensitive material had to be exposed long enough to
darken by the action of the sunlight alone. Talbot exposed sensitive
paper, but not long enough to leave a visible image. He then applied
more silver compound and the image appeared! By this he was able to
dramatically shorten the exposure time needed to make an image.

Between 1844 and1846, Talbot
published in two volumes the world's first book containing photographs.
He named it "The Pencil of Nature"
, and it included
24 pictures, among them botanical contact prints as well as scenes from
Lacock Abbey.

Negatives made with Talbot's
process came to be called Calotype, from the Greek "Kalos" meaning
beautiful. Talbot set up Lacock Abbey as a production line for the
development and duplication of prints.

Other inventions that Talbot
worked on included photo etching, process he
patented as photography in 1858. In 1852, he had already come across
the idea of using a fine mesh screen to obtain what is now called a
"halftone" print. He also predicted infrared photography, photo
duplication (copy machines) and microfilm.

William Fox Talbot was an
extremely talented individual who distinguished himself in almost every
field he touched and he remained intellectually active throughout his
life. He also left extensive archives of photographs, correspondence,
manuscripts and research notes.

After persistent illness, he died
in his study at Lacock Abbey on 17 September 1877.

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